About

I shot all this, as the title suggests, over seven consecutive mornings near Smallwood lake, a place we’ve been fortunate to call home for 24 years now. The winters can be brutal on the lower tier of the Catskills in upstate New York, but the summers are glorious— clean air, not a lot of rain, choral mornings of birdsong, and scents of pine and maple. It’s not a glamorous place. No celebrities or billionaires seeking refuge from the city have found our town. While not great for property values, it makes for good living.

I would often find myself getting up earlier and earlier during my family's summers there, walking out and just tracing the edge of the lake with my feet, examining birds through the long lens of my camera and letting the rising warmth of sun build up on my skin. I started taking the boat out on my explorations and started filming, having notions but not knowing what the endpoint of all these efforts might be. I guess I was figuring out how to keep time, to preserve it in something, and that thing that I made, when I opened it again, would make me feel the same. I thought I'd try something new, a form where it would be ok that nothing important happens and there are no heroes, but the sense of life might somehow bleed out of it.

Each person that comes to the site is meant to experience something different, at least from a formal viewpoint. The sequences of videos are random, and the combinations and framings and soundscapes they might fall into would, by design, be unique. Each viewer's hand movements and twitchy clicking and nervous tapping are all part of the discovery. I just hope people find it something that might clear some headspace, in the forest of media and commerce we seem so lost in, for your own thoughts, your own wisdom, your own memories.

Call it an exercise in consciousness building. I hope to do more of these, see what the form can take, the kinds of stories these Timeweaves, as I am calling them, can hold. Follow me on Instagram to see what's next.

Jovi Juan
London, England / Baguio, Philippines
December, 2025

One quick tip for navigating: moving the mouse near or into the corners of the screen will eventually show you all the stuff.

 

Return to Seven Mornings on Smallwood Lake